Jensen Huang

Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963, and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child. He is the second son of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher. They were a middle-class Taiwanese family that relocated often, and were native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien. Each day, Jensen's mother randomly selected 10 words from the dictionary to teach her sons English. When he was five years old, Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery career and remained there for approximately four years. He attended Ruamrudee International School while in Bangkok.

In the late 1960s, Hsing-tai traveled from Taiwan to New York City to train under an air conditioning company and, after returning home, resolved to send his sons to the United States. At age nine, Jensen, despite not yet being able to speak English fluently, was sent by his parents to live in the United States. He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand. Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth, mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.

When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory. Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm. Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English" and was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. …

After graduating from college, Huang was a microchip designer in Silicon Valley. He was approached for positions at Texas Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and LSI Logic, ultimately choosing the California-based AMD due to already being familiar with the company. From 1984 to 1985, Huang designed AMD microprocessors while simultaneously attending Stanford and raising his two children. However, when he heard of new chip design processes at LSI Logic, Huang left AMD to assume a role as a technical officer at LSI Logic, working under a startup company, Sun Microsystems, where he met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

LSI was in contract with Sun Microsystems and had introduced Huang to Malachowsky and Priem, who were working on a new graphics accelerator card. While the three produced the card's manufacturing process, the relationship between Malachowsky and Priem became strained as the two disputed the chip's design, leading to infighting; according to Malachowsky, they "broke every tool that LSI Logic had in their standard portfolio". In 1989, Huang, Malachowsky, and Priem finalized the accelerator, which they called the "GX graphics engine". GX was a widespread financial success; the sales of the graphics engine contributed to Sun Microsystem's revenue increasing from $262 million in 1987 to $656 million in 1990, and Huang was promoted to be the director of LSI's CoreWare, a division that manufactured chips for hardware vendors. He stayed at LSI until 1993.

When business began to slow for Sun Microsystems after 1990, Huang, alongside Priem and Malachowsky, resigned to found a venture making graphics chips for PC games. They initially named their new company "NVision" until Huang suggested that the company be named "Nvidia" based on the Latin word invidia, as Priem wanted competitors to turn "green with envy". They eventually dropped the "i" to honor the NV1 chip that they were then developing. The three met frequently in 1992 at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose to formulate a business plan. Huang chose for them to meet at Denny's due to his prior work experience at the restaurant chain and because it was "quieter than home and had cheap coffee". The three founded the company during one meeting at a breakfast booth at the diner.

To formally incorporate the company, Huang found a lawyer, James Gaither of Cooley Godward, who demanded the $200 in cash in Huang's pockets to capitalize the company. After that meeting, Huang went back to Priem and Malachowsky to ask each of them for $200 for their respective shares of the company, which meant that Nvidia's initial capital was $600. On April 5, 1993, Huang personally signed Nvidia's original articles of incorporation into effect.

Although he left LSI, Huang remained in good standing with the company and was able to secure funding for Nvidia from LSI's CEO, Wilfred Corrigan, who introduced Huang to venture capitalist Don Valentine. An account cited how Huang's presentation pitch went badly. Valentine, the leader of Sequoia Capital, chose to invest in Nvidia through Corrigan's support, as did Sutter Hill Ventures. The funding enabled Nvidia to begin development efforts toward its first chip and to begin paying wages for its employees. By the first day of operation, Huang was made Nvidia's president and CEO. Even though Huang, at age 30, was younger than Priem and Malachowsky, both Priem and Malachowsky believed that he was prepared to be CEO. According to Priem, "we basically deferred to Jensen on day one" and told Huang, "you're in charge of running the company—all the stuff Chris and I don't know how to do".

As of 2024, Huang has been Nvidia's chief executive for over three decades, a tenure described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley". He owns 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, which went public in 1999. …

As of October 2026, Forbes estimates Huang's net worth to be over US$200 billion, making him the seventh-wealthiest individual in the world.

While at Oregon State University, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, who was his engineering lab partner at the time. They have two children, Spencer and Madison. Spencer launched a bar in Taipei in 2015 that was honored as one of the top 50 bars in Asia by Forbes. The bar closed in April 2021, and he is currently a product manager at Nvidia. Madison previously worked in the hotel industry and is currently director of product marketing at Nvidia. The Huang family lived in ordinary middle-class starter homes in San Jose before Nvidia went public in 1999. In 2003, they moved to a larger house in Los Altos Hills, California, and they acquired a second home in Wailea, Hawaii, the following year. In 2017, a limited liability company reportedly linked to the Huangs acquired a mansion in San Francisco for $38 million.

Huang and AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su are relatives. His mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed. Huang was unaware of their familial connection until Su became AMD's CEO.

A December 2024 investigation by The New York Times reported that Huang had set up an intentionally defective grantor trust and a grantor retained annuity trust. It was estimated that these trusts and his foundation would reduce his family's estate tax by $8 billion.

Huang has dual Taiwanese and American citizenship. During his time at AMD in 1984, Huang, who grew up speaking Taiwanese Hokkien, began learning Mandarin Chinese in order to communicate with Chinese photomask workers employed at the company. He has said that he learned the language phonetically through regular conversations with his co-workers. He makes frequent visits back to Taiwan.

Huang and Taiwanese billionaire Charles Liang, co-founder of Supermicro, are longtime friends. Both companies were established in 1993 and have collaborated on products, with the latter utilizing Nvidia AI chips in its servers. Huang is also a close friend of TSMC founder Morris Chang.

Huang got a tattoo of an abstract version of the Nvidia logo when the company's stock price hit US$100, which he first publicly showed at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference. …

Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, established the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation in 2007 and donated $330 million of Nvidia shares. The foundation's assets, primarily Nvidia shares, have significantly appreciated, reaching a value exceeding $12 billion as of late 2025, placing it among the largest private foundations in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of its grants are allocated to donor-advised funds, including the GeForce Fund at Schwab Charitable. In June 2025, the Huangs contributed an additional $60 million in Nvidia stock to the foundation.

On October 14, 2022, Jensen and Lori Huang donated $50 million toward a new $213 million research and education center at Oregon State University. The center will house one of the nation's most powerful supercomputers, built around Nvidia's DGX SuperPOD and OVX SuperPOD systems, giving faculty the computing power to tackle complex research problems. Waste heat from the system's cooling will be repurposed to heat more than 500,000 square feet of building space on OSU's Corvallis Campus.

In early 2025, the foundation matched a $22.5 million fundraising effort by the California College of the Arts, contributing an equivalent amount to complete a $45 million campaign to address the institution's financial deficits and enrollment challenges, marking one of the largest individual gifts in the college's history. The foundation has also provided grants ranging from five to six figures to organizations including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, the Tides Center, the B612 Foundation, AI4ALL (promoting diversity in artificial intelligence), and Mental Health Innovations (developing technology-based mental health solutions). In accordance with Internal Revenue Service regulations for private foundations, the foundation disbursed $123 million in 2024 and was projected to distribute $369 million in 2025.

In 2026, Huang donated $10 million to relief efforts for the 2026 Nepal–Tibet floods.